Will Obama Protect Public Land, or Keep Leasing It Out?

By Rocky Barker -
Feb 7, 2013

Goodbye, cowboy boots. Hello, hiking
boots. That’s the symbolism at least, with President Barack Obama’s nomination of Sally Jewell, the president and chief
executive officer of Recreational Equipment Inc., to become U.S.
interior secretary.

This is more than the latest sign that the American West is
moving past the resource battles of the last century. It also
acknowledges what politicians have known for a while: The
outdoor-sports industry commands a seat at the adults’ table
with loggers, miners and ranchers in deciding how to use public
lands.

Jewell has been a leading voice of the outdoor industry
that created $646 billion in U.S. sales and services in 2011 and
6.1 million jobs. Many of these jobs are in a West dominated by
more than 500 million acres of national parks, federal rangeland
and wildlife refuges, over which Jewell will become landlord if
confirmed.

She will also be responsible for 68 percent of the nation’s
oil and gas reserves and millions of acres of federal mining
lands. Jewell, a University of Washington engineering graduate,
began her career with Mobil Corp., working in the oil fields of
Oklahoma and Wyoming, and later worked for Rainier Bank
overseeing petroleum land investments. That pedigree has already
brought praise from the oil and gas industry.

Outdoor Industry

Yet her leadership in making the outdoor industry a force
for conservation in Washington and Western state capitals has
made environmentalists consider her one of their own. She is
credited with leading REI, an outdoor retailer with almost $2
billion in revenue, back to profitability.

Most U.S. interior secretaries have been career politicians
or operatives elevated from a Western governor’s seat, Congress
or a state government. They got the job because the traditional
resource industries that dominated the Western economy for most
of the 20th century either supported them or could tolerate
them.

Obama’s first-term secretary, Ken Salazar, a former
Colorado senator who wears a cowboy hat and boots, came from the
ranching community, one of the old West’s traditional
industries, along with mining and logging. This experience
helped as he placated Western governors who were angry about the
return of the wolf and about proposals to restrict activities on
millions of acres of sagebrush habitat in an effort to keep sage
grouse off the federal endangered-species list.

Jewell is more likely to be found in a kayak than on a
horse. During her introduction by Obama, she said Salazar’s
boots would be hard to fill. “But I think I might get lost in
your hat,” she said.

Today, across much of the West, loggers and tree huggers
are sitting down together to restore the forests they once
fought over. In places such as the Clearwater National Forest in
Idaho, they are negotiating how to promote logging and road
obliteration to improve wildlife habitat and create needed jobs
in rural communities. The timber harvest has risen to 1990s
levels.

These collaborative efforts clash with those of Republican-
controlled legislatures in Arizona, Idaho and Utah to push
legislation to demand the federal government turn over federal
lands to states. This idea is a nonstarter for the wide majority
of Westerners in both parties, and strengthens the hand of Obama
and Jewell.

Jewell will face the same problems that Westerners from
both parties face. An interior secretary only gets a national
audience when there’s a big oil spill or giant forest fire.
MSNBC interrupted its program yesterday to show Obama’s
announcement of Jewell’s nomination. Then it went back to a
story about gay membership in the Boy Scouts.

Conservation Legacy

Ultimately, Jewell and Obama will be judged by the
conservation legacy they leave, not by how many mining leases
they grant. In a time of climate change, when scientists say
saving every species is no longer a realistic goal and no
wilderness is really pristine anymore, it is more complex.

Obama’s conservation constituency will look at the numbers.
This week, former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt urged Obama
to protect as much federal land as it is leasing annually for
oil and gas. During Obama’s first term, 6 million acres were
leased compared with the 2.6 million acres that were protected.

Babbitt called for generous use of the Antiquities Act of
1906, which gives the president the power to designate national
monuments. With several proposals planned around the West, how
soon Jewell acts will tell much about whether she is a break
from the past in policy as well as style.

(Rocky Barker is the author of “Scorched Earth: How the
Fires of Yellowstone Changed America,” published by Island
Press. He is also the environment and energy reporter for the
Idaho Statesman. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this article:
Rocky Barker at rbarker@rockybarker.com.